Zollverein Coking Plant

Very large area, much to see and discover and almost every corner of the bike to reach.

The coking plant is already an impressive building. The skeletons of the cooling towers also look very interesting. Here the cement asbestos lining was dismantled.

The coking plant was built in the years 1957 to 1961 in connection with the central pit Zollverein XII. The industrial architect Fritz Schupp took on the design of the coking plant. On September 12, 1961, the first official oven was pressed. In 1961 the coking plant had 192 coke ovens with a daily capacity of 5000 tons of coke. In 1973 the number of furnaces was increased from 192 to 304 and the capacity increased to 8000 tons of coke per day. In the meantime, up to 1100 people were employed. In order to produce 8000 t of coke, you need 10500 t of coking coal (fatty coal). The difference between 10500 t and 8000 t are the volatile components gas, tar, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and benzene. The main product, coke, was used for smelting in iron and steel production. Tar, ammonia (NH3), hydrogen sulphide and crude benzene were removed from up to 4 million cubic meters of coke oven gas every day. Part of the gas (45%) was burned to heat the furnaces. The temperature there was 1350 °C in order to maintain temperatures of 1000 to 1100 °C in the furnaces. The remaining part (55%) of the gas was compressed to 8 bar in a compressor system and fed into the long-distance gas network of Ruhrgas AG. The by-products such as raw tar and raw benzene were sold to the chemical industry. Ammonia was converted into salt for agriculture. The hydrogen sulfide was processed into sulfuric acid.Due to the steel crisis in the 1990s and the resulting fall in demand for coke, the coking plant was shut down on June 30, 1993.Since October 2006, the former control center of the coking plant has housed the Erwin L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This research facility of the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Radboud University of Nijmegen develops devices and processes for magnetic resonance tomography.Source: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokerei_Zollverein